One of my favorite hidden delights in Manhattan is the lobby of the old Daily News building on the corner of 42nd Street and Second Avenue. Though the newspaper abandoned this Art Deco masterpiece nearly 20 years ago for a home on the dreary Far West Side – a bland space that the paper will leave this spring for even cheaper digs downtown – the lobby of its eponymous building is still dominated by a massive revolving globe, described neatly by RoadsideAmerica.com:

A 1941 postcard image of the globe in the lobby of the old Daily News headquarters.

The globe is 12 feet in diameter and weighs 4,000 pounds. It is housed in a mirrored circular pit beneath a black glass dome, and is lit from below. A sunburst, inlaid into the terrazzo floor, radiates out from this spherical beauty, with text marking the direction and distance to major cities around the world. The lobby walls are decorated with contraptions of precise measurement such as thermometers, wind speed indicators and an ornate world clock.

I loved that clock! I used to visit the lobby regularly when I worked catty-corner at 800 Second Ave. in my first writing job after J-school. The inlaid bronze rays of the sunburst, indicating the mileage to Valparaiso, Paris, Tangiers and other locales more or less exotic, never failed to stir me. Back then, anyone could walk through the main lobby to dally along two aisles of galleries displaying Daily News photos, past and present. It was a wonderful way to spend a lunch hour.

Like this:

I arranged with a Stony Brook alum, Dave Joachim, an editor at The New York Times, to visit the paper with the nine students in my Reporting in NYC class on Jan. 11. The last time I brought a class there, the very senior editor who took us around pointed out staffer after staffer with Ivy League or similar private-school credentials – kind of a tin ear, I thought, and I figured Dave wouldn’t be so snooty. He wasn’t, of course; he was charming, and though he made the point that no Stony Brook senior is going to walk straight from graduation into a job at the Times, his experience – toiling in the vineyards of tech trade publications for 10 years (a worthy but unglamorous endeavor) before he took a stab and reached out to a Times business editor he’d met, a stab that after a year and a half of tryouts and waiting led to a job on the business copy desk, from which he gradually moved up to his current and very exciting job as banking editor – his experience shows that the Times isn’t out of reach forever to graduates of a public university. Nor should it be. Isn’t one of the problems of contemporary mainstream journalism the coziness of elite journalists and their sources?

Back to our visit. Dave had arranged a terrific morning for us, beginning, he hoped, with our sitting in on the morning Page One meeting (sitting in the visitors gallery, mind you). But someone had beaten him to the gallery seats, booking them for a group of students from Princeton; no comment. Quick on his feet, Dave arranged for us to observe the morning meeting at the Continuous News Desk, which couldn’t have been a happier turn of events.

The Continuous News Desk meeting begins, much as Page One meetings do, with editors from Continue reading →

Readers of this blog may or may not recall my promise a while back to write about Daniel Okrent‘s visit to Stony Brook. (What? You haven’t been wondering about this? I can tell you it has been on my mind. The blog is a relentless taskmaster!) Okrent, the founder of New England Monthly, a longtime honcho at Time Inc., inventor of Rotisserie League Baseball and the first public editor at The New York Times, hired in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, had a lot to tell our students. Herewith, some high points of his visit, which included lunch with faculty, a talk to a journalism history class and a half-hour discussion with graduating seniors.

On anonymous sources: “It’s the single largest complaint that readers have,” Okrent said, harking back to his two years as the Times ombudsman. “They just don’t believe it” when reporters attribute quotes to that journalistic Zelig, Mr. or Ms. Knowledgeable Source. Readers think “the reporter just made it up.” He gently mocked the verbal contortions The Times inserts to defend its use of K.S.: “who did not want to be named because he was not authorized to discuss the matter” and similar pretzel logic. The correct approach to protecting a source’s identity, Okrent said, should not be to tell the reader why the source wanted to remain anonymous but to explain why the reporter and editor “allowed this person to remain anonymous.” Ah, transparency: “to whom this newspaper granted anonymity to protect the reporter’s access …” Okrent also noted the English model, in which the reporter is assumed to have vetted thoroughly all the information he or she puts in print. “The byline stands in for anonymous attribution,” he said. “The authority of the institution” is put on the line. While this model is more in the nature of how news magazines or newspaper analysis pieces operate in the United States, he said, it would be a radical change for daily newspaper stories. Finally, Okrent said, there is the implied contract a reporter makes with a source when promising anonymity. Continue reading →

I’ve been planning to discuss the idea of digital news “curation” with the students in my Journalism 24/7 class. This blog post by the ever-insightful Ken Doctor is just what I need to kick-start the conversation.

Ken writes:

“The idea of the FWIX’s and Outside.ins: provide a round-up of the best local news, by aggregating local news sources, big-time and small, blog, story and broadcast, professional and user-gen, applying some hierarchy of quality to it. Both efforts race for the same audiences and related advertising as the original content-creators, AOL’s newly expanding Patch and Examiner.com. In addition to those of course, the number of hyperlocal efforts increases by the day (and some of them are being rounded up by local dailies, witness the Seattle Times aggregation, for instance).”

Later in the post, he notes:

“The new-fangled word for it is curation, rounding up lots of content, providing some hierarchy of value. Of course, it’s just good editing, bolstered by intelligent technology, and a growing flexibility to accept and work with a wider world of voices, styles and views. … Importantly, it also asserts that readers are smart: they can tell the difference between a New York Times (or Sarasota Herald) byline and that of a community contributor. That assertion is a Pro-Am gamble for the Times and all proud brands, but it’s one that should be made — and backed up with clear, prominent and never-ending disclosure.” (emphasis added)

I’ve quoted at such length from Ken’s post because, as we teach our students, you quote what you couldn’t say better yourself. Ken captures the key points that ally this new style of editing, the curation function, with solid journalistic practices. “Clear, prominent and never-ending disclosure” prevents the stupid mistakes that have felled reporters and bloggers in several recent, highly publicized incidents. Disclosure also protects news organizations that practice digital curation from problems erupting from the stories the curators link to.

I’m convinced that curation holds great promise for hard-pressed newsrooms that have closed bureaus and slashed reporting staffs. As Mike Masnick recently pointed out on techdirt, curation could free reporters from re-reporting run-of-the-mill stories and allow them to pursue folos or fresh angles or different stories. I’m not saying that re-reporting stories broken elsewhere is a worthless exercise; re-reporting can certainly correct or clarify flaws in the original piece. And assignment editors will have to make tough choices when they could link to another news outlet’s (or a reliable blogger’s) take on a mayoral press conference or a journo scrum on the courthouse steps instead of tying up one of their own for a day.

But tough times mean tough choices.

Beyond its necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention appeal, curation allows a news organization to expand the perspectives it offers its readers. It gives editors the power to guide readers who want to explore a topic or issue. A trusted news brand that curates successfully will keep curious readers from moving off its site to hunt around on Google and Wikipedia. Curation allows journalists to harness the power and multiplicity of the Web, adding breadth and depth. A reader’s good experience with an editor’s curation should deepen her trust in the site where she started her journey.